Exhibitions "Anna Akhmatova Memorial Apartment" and "Iosif Brodsky. Still Life"

About exhibition

Visitors can take a walk through the Fountain House, visiting the museum's two exhibitions. The exhibition "Anna Akhmatova Memorial Apartment" tells the story of the Soviet period of Russian history, when members of the Silver Age intelligentsia had to preserve their world and their identity under a totalitarian state. The historical destinies of the twentieth century, reflected in Akhmatova's fate, are revealed through a variety of museum objects. The exhibition is divided into a memorial section, which has restored the Punin–Akhmatova apartment to its 1920s–1940s appearance, and a literary section governed by a special logic — sub specie aeternitatis (from the point of view of eternity), or, in Akhmatova's poetic formula: "I remember everything at the same time...". The exhibition "Iosif Brodsky. Still Life" presents the life and work of one of the major Russian poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Iosif Brodsky did not live in the Fountain House, but the largest collection of his belongings was assembled here. The exhibition includes several hundred items that furnished Brodsky's apartments in Leningrad (the famous "one and a half rooms") and in the United States. The conceptual basis of the exhibition is the poem "Still Life" (1971), in which Brodsky formulated his attitude toward the problems of posthumous existence ("nonexistence") and the material world (the objects surrounding him). Furniture, typewriters, clothing, mementos, and books are arranged into a huge still life in the center of the room, which invites individual interpretation by the visitor.